Facebook wants to become a fully personalized online newspaper

Facebook aims at renewing its news feed to become a personalized online newspaper, which may clash with its users’ expectations.

Reading applications such as Flipboard,
which aggregate information from publishers and content from social
media are becoming increasingly popular. Social networks are therefore
beginning to be interested in this opportunity, wishing to offer a
service of online information directly on their platform. This year for
example, Linkedin has spent $90 million in the mobile information company, Pulse,
fulfilling thereby its ambition to become a platform publishing
professional reference. Facebook holds the advantage of having already a
large amount of information about its users available and can offer
customized products to suit diverse needs. The purpose of Goal Cox (vice
president of product) and Mark Zuckerberg (CEO) is to provide a
"useful" experience, providing a balanced mix of finely selected content
and quality for people worldwide.

Facebook wants to highlight the good quality content

They wish to create a newsfeed that could complement the daily
rituals of users, such as reading the newspaper every morning. Facebook
teams have thus examined different interfaces with in mind this
idealistic form of users’ behavior and a focus on pictures. As part of
this initiative, the Facebook newsfeed was redesigned in early March of
this year: media format, stories and photographs were enlarged, taking
up more space on the screen and making information smaller and more
qualitative. The company also bought last year, the facial recognition
software Face.com the purpose is to identify Facebook users on the
pictures but also to identify the poor quality content. Similarly, in
June, Facebook added the use of hashtags, announcing one more tool to
search for information. The main advantage of Facebook to provide
personalized content to each of its users is the amount of information
it holds on their interests. In addition, the social media is able to
know and use a lot of data to which it is the only one able to access
this information, as it is semi-private.

Users are not yet ready to accept this change in content

However, Facebook users do not seem to be willing to see more serious
information in their newsfeeds. Indeed, the most visited and shared
topics on Facebook even seem to be the opposite, such as viral content
(photos and stories from Buzzfeed or Upworthy example). Thus, the
difference between Facebook that leaders want to see and the one that
users are currently making of it, is becoming visible. Moreover,
Facebook begins to adjust its algorithms to highlight the content it
believes readers should see, away down some of the stuff that is
currently popular. The solution for now is to find a balance between
these two types of content, and then probably start to get consumers to
focus more on the "useful" content. Finally, the announcement of
Facebook desire to offer a service of personalized online newspaper
seems to be strangely pretty well coordinated with the end of Google Reader, the RSS feed agregator of Google.